Resistance is.... faithful
Eusebius wrote 'The history of the Church' around 320 AD. He became Bishop of Caesarea, and was respected by General (later Emperor) Constantine.
He witnessed the severe persecution of Christians and the astonishing changes that came with Constantine's conversion.
The Church had grown through both strife and security, through God's grace and the indwelling of his Holy Spirit, in very ordinary people. It just required for them to be bold and true.
Today, the alarming changes we're seeing in civil life with the growth of authoritarianism in Government require us to also respond boldly, with grace and truth. It's amazing what God can then do.
We can see in Canada, and we've seen before in Germany, that societies do not follow laws just because they exist - on their own they are just heaps of words. They live by the civil institutions, the wills of the decision-makers and influencers (including us) to enforce the practical wisdom of good law.
The deepest law
Looking around the world few countries enjoy the freedoms and benefits we still have. We don't realise how much that depends not just on historical Bible-based wisdom but also on the relatively good standards expected of its enablers. God has provided this through successive Christian revivals in Britain and America. It's this wisdom and the governing behaviours that are now being attacked deliberately, deviously and with relish.
A lot of attention has been on 'the science' and we've seen that its use is not as neutral as some fondly imagined. There are physical laws: gravitational constant, speed of light etc, but God made these up. What is infinitely stronger, totally immutable, is the living moral law, an expression of God's being, before the beginning, and this will always, later or sooner, come to pass.
Pretended Compassion
It is us that will now be the subject of future histories - what did the Church do in the 2020s AD? As in the 320s, there will be those that faithfully and graciously worked away to 'seek and to save that which is lost' pleading for personal repentance and a wholesome and lively civil society that will flourish in proportion to its alignment with the living law of life. There will be some who may not have been too keen on 'the church' for various reasons, but who now see in specific Christians the only hope for society and are also drawn to Him. There will also be those on the inside that were never really in love with anything of God and turn traitors repudiating good society and picking it apart out of envy and pretended compassion for those it challenged - deliberately, deviously and with relish.
This aspect is the one we struggle to get our emotions around as it just does not happen around here. However the Saul Alinsky play-book 'Rules for Radicals' shows that this is exactly the tactic.
Persecution is now
There is defamation: racist, terrorist, fascist ...
There are 'manufactured threats' where Mounties, dressed not in homely red but in grey assault uniforms with automatic weapons, round up peaceful demonstrators to imply that they are dangerous (while the Canadian gas pipeline is coincidentally being violently sabotaged).
Or 'False flag' operations where a well-known building is shown on fire and blamed on truckers only for it to be shown that the video is of another building torched by someone else, or anti-Semitic signs shown to have been taken weeks before in Florida. Who carries these out - the Gov or its well-funded allies?
Then the threat of financial ruin as finance institutions colluding with the authorities freeze (steal!) the assets of anyone connected with the protest - even if you gave $10 from afar (anyone?). Forget data privacy!
Those who were arrested for just being there will suffer exaggerated judicial sanctions over long periods.
This is how many are being treated in the US, is it the start of how the Jews were treated in Germany, or the Christians by Nero in Rome?
Looking for better
In the UK the 'Irreverent' podcast (one host is a Vicar in E Sussex) recently hosted Lord David Frost (was Ambassador & Brexit Minister) who has had a view of Government actions from the inside over the past few years. This included comments on our CoE. People like David Frost have been looking for better from the leadership but did find encouragement from these guys!
transcript: https://t.co/0HMwUrT34L
audio: people-need-depth-lord-frost-on-covid-net-zero-brexit
Now for something completely different!
